i've been using fedora 17. it's a pain because of the frequent updates which make things break. simple things are just broken. i would just like to have a stable OS. i always feel like the rug is being pulled from underneath me.

i was thinking about switching to centos or rh.

centos is basically rh without the branding and support (with centos receiving updates a little later)?

my main concern is the nvidia driver. currently centos uses an older version (290) of the nvidia driver?

how is it updating the latest nvidia drivers and how well do they work? do they work as well with the older kernel that centos uses?

how stable is houdini with centos?

All I can say is that is by far the most stable Linux I've been using. I don't recommend it for people who likes taking things from the easiest side though. It's seriously outdated, so if you're ‘yuming’ lots of rpms, you'll quickly find your self compiling lots of stuff from scratch. But this rigor is exactly the reason why it's so stable, so, well, you got the point.

I was also surprised how poor the general community support for centos is. Many os projects provide debs, but no rpms at all.

We have switched studio to centos all around. At home I'm centos too. The latest nvidia drivers I've been touching were 295.xx though, and they weren't particularly easy to install (had to remove those nouveau drivers first, and recompile kernel module with nvidia installer, which never happened to me on Ubuntu). But it was worth it me thinks and Houdini works just as good as on any other Linux.

good luck!
skk.